Teaching

Scenarios

We have designed a scenario where a human plays a cognitive game with a social robot. Currently, this is the game “pairs”, where players must remember and find pairs of cards from a set of hidden cards. Other games would be possible, of course, but we chose pairs because its outcome (i.e., how many pairs a player found) is also indicative of current cognitive capability.

In this scenario, a the humanoid iCub interacts with an interlocutor through speech and gestures in order to give directions on a map. The interaction is specifically designed to provide an enhanced user experience by being aware of non-verbal social signals. Therefore, we take spatial communicative cues into account and to react to them accordingly.

A pro-active mobile robot builds up a situation model of its environment. It observes actions by human interlocutors and understands their verbal descriptions. This representation is later used to verbalize the location of arbitrary objects in a human-like manner.

Being active is a crucial health issue in our modern office-oriented lives. But often, factors such as a high workload and time-consuming side effects prevent us from keeping a daily exercise routine. Recently, many exergames have been deployed on different home entertainment system to provide an easy access to a daily sport program. However, the long-term effects of such systems and the lack of embodiment are questionable, Therefore, we investage how a physical embodied robot coach can affect people while working out. Research has shown that people tend to perform more goal-oriented when having the support of a coach.

Persons with cognitive disabilities like dementia, Alzheimer's disease or autism are often not capable of fulfilling activities of daily living (ADLs) which leads to a limitation or even a loss of independence. The primary goal of this project is to support those persons in their ADLs by applying intelligent room environment which helps to increase their independence in daily life.

Past Scenarios

The so called “Home-Tour” represents a scenario in which a standard customer has purchased a new robot, for assisting in a private home environment. As a first step towards autonomous operation the robot has to be familiarized with its working environment. Since private surroundings vary a lot, only a very limited amount of knowledge can be provided in advance. Consequently, the robot has to adapt to the possessor's individual home. Moreover, it has cope with disarranged or newly bought furniture without an expert modifying the system.

VAMPIRE (Visual Active Memory Processes and Interactive REtrieval) is a research project on cognitive computer vision which was funded by the European Union (IST-2001-34401, May 2002- July 2005). It investigates artifical intelligent systems that are able to understand what they see based on what they have previously memorised. In this sense, the research focuses on Visual Active Memory Processes. Another important goal is to develop advanced techniques for Interactive Retrieval memory spectacles.

To investigate communication properly, one approach is to monitor as many channels that transmit communicative signals as possible. Apart from speech this includes also nonverbal channels like facial expressions, gestures, head gestures, eye gaze, body posture etc.

Many approaches for robot learning observe the human, to emulate or otherwise learn from human behavior. However, often humans do not know how to interact with the robot and furthermore, visual analysis of humans is hard. Thus, in the curious robot scenario, we have turned the usual paradigm around: In this scenario, the robot asks the human questions about objects, its environment, and so on.